OPINION:
President Obama and the Democrats were hit by a ton of bricks on Tuesday. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.
Even a ton of bricks understates what the voters did to Mr. Obama and his party. A political earthquake was more like it, and they’re still reeling from the political aftershocks.
It was not just a massive repudiation of the president’s harmful and unpopular policies on the economy and health care, and his incompetent, hands-off management of a wasteful, scandal-plagued government. It was also a nationwide repudiation of the Democrats, who remained cruelly silent throughout six years of a low-income, painfully sluggish, high-unemployment economy that their votes had inflicted on the country.
The voters demoted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to a powerless, minority status by putting the GOP firmly in control of that chamber and strengthening their majority in the House.
The voters crushing rejection of the Democrats was not only in the nation’s capitals, but also in the governorships of deep blue, tax-happy Democratic states such as Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois. The GOP’s gubernatorial majority rose to at least 31, very close to historic levels in the modern era.
Equally important, the Republicans’ sweeping victory extended to state legislatures, where they took control in Nevada, Colorado’s Senate, and House chambers in Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine, West Virginia and New Hampshire. At this writing, it means the GOP will control 67 chambers, a new record, and hold full political control of 24 states where their party will hold the governorships and state legislatures.
Heading into the final weeks of the midterm elections, Mr. Obama boastfully told Americans what was at stake in this election in a speech that had GOP officials cheering and Democratic strategists asking, “How could he be so stupid.”
“I am not on the ballot this fall But make no mistake — these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them,” he said about his unpopular agenda.
His egotistical admission spread like wildfire throughout every GOP campaign team in the country. What voters heard was that the Democrats on their ballots represented his policies, and they voted against them in a tidal-wave election that swept his party out of power and effectively killed whatever remained of his unfulfilled agenda in the final two years of his presidency.
Yet the day after his party’s defeat, there was Mr. Obama in the White House press room, battered, bloodied and beaten, but spouting the same old snake-oil that Congress refused to enact and the American people had just overwhelmingly rejected.
“I hear you,” he told the voters Wednesday, but “their message went in one presidential ear and out the other,” wrote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank.
While Mr. Obama was clearly the architect of his policies, he did not acknowledge his own unpopularity, nor accept any blame whatsoever for his party’s losses.
“Do you feel any responsibility to recalibrate your agenda?” asked Associated Press reporter Julie Pace.
No, he suggested, falling back on the same old, small-bore ideas that have been widely discredited and were going nowhere in Congress. “A minimum wage increase, for example,” he replied, was “something I talked about a lot during the campaign.”
When Congress asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to analyze the president’s proposal, it warned that his idea had one huge and painful drawback: Millions of struggling small- to medium-size businesses would be hurt by higher payroll expenses. At a minimum, the CBO forecast, Mr. Obama’s higher wage mandate would kill between 500,000 and 1 million jobs.
Throughout this year, the president boasted that the economy was much improved, but exit polls Tuesday showed that for most voters, the economy and jobs was their No. 1 concern.
Nearly a third said the economy is getting worse, while another third said it hadn’t changed much. Overall, seven in 10 voters said the economy was in bad shape.
When Mr. Obama was asked if he is now thinking about any new proposals, he sounded woefully unprepared, as if he had never given it any thought. “Every single day, I’m looking for, ’How can we do what we need to do better?’ ” he said.
Then an exasperated Ed Henry of Fox News said, “I haven’t heard you say a specific thing during this news conference that you would do differently.”
Mr. Obama, who apparently hasn’t the faintest idea what he could do differently, said it would be “premature” for him to answer that question. He wanted to “hear from the Republicans” first when they meet at the White House.
The Republicans’ agenda is by now is pretty well known. They want to pass a revenue-neutral tax-reform bill to cleanse the tax code of costly corporate welfare and other tax loopholes in exchange for lowering income tax-rates across the board to accelerate faster economic growth and job creation.
They want to re-enact fast-track trade authority to open up new export markets for American goods, legislation that Mr. Obama and the Democrats have blocked since Day One. U.S. exports fell further last month, weakening economic growth.
They want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that the president has blocked, preventing thousands of jobs from being created, and repeal key parts of Obamacare that are hurting businesses, stunting job growth and raising health insurance premiums.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John A. Boehner will lay this out when they meet on Friday. Only this time, the Republicans are holding all the high cards, and Mr. Obama has an empty hand.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.